Disruption between the sheets
In just under a decade, the bed-in-a-box concept has disrupted an entire industry and revolutionised how people buy mattresses. Leaning into behavioural biases was a significant factor in its success, according to Dan Monheit, CEO of Hardhat.
Bed. Where we end and start the day. The place of dreams, yet, if you choose the wrong mattress, it can be the stuff of nightmares. Sleep has become a precious commodity. The world has suddenly woken up to the critical role sleep plays in our lives, with benefits that span our physical health, mental well-being, brain function, and immunity.
The seven to nine hours (if you’re smart) we spend asleep per night dictates the rest of our waking hours. So traditionally, buying a bed has been a high-risk, high-involvement, high-investment category for most. In our attempts to get it right, we used to think nothing of heading into a store, hopping from one bed to the next until we’d found our version of bedtime nirvana. Therefore, if you’d been pitching startup ideas a decade ago, trying to convince investors of the categories that would make a smooth transition to e-commerce, mattresses would have been close to the bottom of the list.
This makes it all the more astonishing that it’s been less than a decade since Caspar Sleep, the US-based bed-in-a-box pioneer, started selling latex and memory foam mattresses online. In just nine years, buying a mattress unseen on the internet has gone from the stuff of dreams to accounting for around one in every ten transactions.
